WEIMAR, Germany – As he stood on the windswept site of the Buchenwald concentration camp, President Obama said on Friday that the atrocities committed during the Nazi Holocaust should serve as a perpetual lesson to “be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time.”

“To this day there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful,” Mr. Obama said. “This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts.”

One day after delivering an address to the Islamic world in Cairo, the president said “the moment is now” to press for peace in the Middle East. The stop at Buchenwald continued the theme of Mr. Obama’s trip, which culminates on Saturday at the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasions of World War II.

The president was accompanied by Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel and survivors of Buchenwald, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who as a boy was sent to the camp, where his father was killed. On a cloudy and cool day, against a stubborn wind, the assembly walked throughout the camp, with Mr. Wiesel, a Nobel Prize Winner, providing a running narrative.

“These sights have not lost their horror with the passage of time,” Mr. Obama said, standing alongside the group. “More than half a century later our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished. I will not forget what I have seen here today.”

It was Buchenwald, more than anywhere else, that embodied the contradiction of a civilized society’s descent into organized barbarism. The camp sits just a few miles outside the city of Weimar, one of the country’s leading cultural centers as home to the great German writers Goethe and Schiller.

With his hands held behind his back and a thoughtful expression on his face, Mr. Obama walked through the former concentration camp, flanked by Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Wiesel, who survived a death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald and was at the camp when it was liberated by Allied Forces in April 1945.

Mr. Wiesel spoke movingly about the death of his father a few months before the liberation of the camp, calling his visit on Friday, “A way of coming and visit my father’s grave. But he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky, which has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.”

Mr. Obama told of a personal connection to the concentration camp. His great-uncle, Charles Payne, helped liberate a sub-camp of Buchenwald called Ohrdruf.

“The place teaches us that we must be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time,” Mr. Obama said. “We must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests.”

“I would have gladly gone to see him today,” said Wolfgang Düll, 68, a pensioner in Weimar. Mr. Düll said he remembered from when he was a child the way the guards forced inmates to march to Buchenwald from the satellite camps. “One shouldn’t forget that. One shouldn’t forget.”

“To this day there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful,” Mr. Obama said.

Yes indeed, and the world has not forgotten the following too:

1. The deliberate and illegal displacement of the innocent Palestinians from their homeland and replacing them with Ashkenazi Jews because of the German atrocities. It is outrageous that instead of punishing the Germans for their heinous crimes, the West rebuilt Germany and punished the innocent defenseless Palestinians. To add salt to injury, they have helped Israel grab more lands every year since her forceful creation. Is that Western justice?

2. The recent Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

3. The 2006 Israeli atrocities in Lebanon.

4. The killings of nearly million innocent civilians by the US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and the illegal invasion of Iraq.

5. The 1953 CIA coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of the Iranian Prime Minister, Dr. Mossadegh, resulting in the death and torture of thousands of innocent Iranians for the next 25 years.

6. The deliberate and illegal downing of scheduled Iranian passenger airline flying in the international air corridor by the US forces resulting in killing all 293 people on board.

Finally, the truth and justice demands that you should not force people to accept and feel guilty for someone else’s crimes while you refuse to accept or apologize or compensate the victims or their families for your and your friends’ crimes.

The fact that there are idiots who think that the holocaust never happened is simply unbelievable. My 89 year old was a bombadier in World War II and his plane was shot down, resulting in his imprisonment for the duration of the war in a Nazi prison camp which was a satellite camp of Dachau. He witnessed the torture and murder of Jews, Russians and homosexuals. He now looks at the controversy surrounding America’s policy of torture and denouncement of the Geneva Convention Accords regarding the treatment of prisoners with dismay. My father notes that those responsible for torture and murder in World War II were held accountable for their war crimes and that those Americans responsbile now should be as well. He says that America is America because we do not conduct ourselves that way. I agree.

The Zionist occupiers of Palestine are carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing of the rightful inhabitants, the Palestinian people. President Carter referrred to it as apartheid. A denial of this is baseless and hateful too.

Elie Wiesel’s eloquent words today are a living memorial to the bravery of the men, women and children who died
at Buchenwald & Auschwitz.
President Obama’s reference to his great-uncle’s participation in the liberation may serve to remind one of
six degrees of separation” and the interconnecteness.

With respect to past articles of this nature, I have pointed out to you something you seem to have “forgotten”. I will do it again: The deiberate and illegal displacement of over 800,000 Jews from their Arab homelands from the 1940s onward. These people and their descendants are the majority of the Jewish population of Israel. They outnumber the Ashkenazi and all other Jews there regardless of national origin.

Saying that the palestinian suffer is like those of world war 2 atrocities is a deservice to the plestinian cause. Why are you saying this? do you think that people are stupid enough to think that the israelis have concentration camps in the west bank and gaza and that they are putting all of the palestinians in lines and shot them with machine guns? do you think I will belive that the israelis build death camps with ovens and gas chambers and are killing hundreds of thousands of plestinians? did the israealis opened work camps for plestinians to work and starve until they die? is this what you are trying to say?

So l suggest you do some more thinking before jumping to comment like that. Let me try to promote the plestinian cause: The plestinians should get a country of their own! Palestinians, Israelis and the whole arab and western world should work towards this goal. It will be hard but lets hope we will see that day that it will happen. Trying to minimize jewish sufferings in the holocust will not get you there, it will merely get a few more people think that the ambassador of plestinian cause are ignorants.

If the “Zionists” (better know as Israelis) are genocidal, they’re sure doing a poor job at it, as the Palestinian population has only grown since the UN partition and Israel’s independence. It also further trivializes real acts of genocide.

I majored in German in college in the 1960’s and spent a semester in (West) Germany studying. When I took a half hour train ride from Munich to Dachau, I was absolutely stunned to realize that a concentration camp that killed untold thundredsof thousands of Jews and others stood in the middle of a peaceful little town which was a suburb of one of the largest cities of Germany. I walked to the concentration camp, just a few minutes away from the train station — right in the midst of the town.
I will never believe that ordinary Germans did not know what was happening. It was right in front of them and they worked in these concentration camps. That civilized people could so quickly descend into barbarism is a lesson everyone should study, so such a thing never ever happens again.
But, alas, I see too many fascist tendencies, in both the Bush administration and today’s GOP. Knowing how quickly democracy and civilization disintegrated in Germany in the early 1930’s, the Bush administration and today’s GOP really does frighten me.

No, people have had enough of your daily false propaganda. In fact, you are self-righteous and ignorant because what I have stated are facts that are recorded in the history of the world. To people like you, only the sufferings of those you support count, but the sufferings of others do not mean a thing. That’s shameful.

As for Elie Wiesel, despite his loss and sufferings, he has lost the sympathy and respect of millions of people around the world because of his unyielding support of the Israeli atrocities. This man who suffered so much at the hands of Germans refuses to criticize the Israelis for the unnecessary killings of innocent Palestinians.

Azar:
You shouldn’t only look at one side. You are talking about “innocent Palestinians”, but you overlook the fact that these “innocent” Palestinians train their children to be soldiers from birth. There are enough videos spread which so how extreme these Palestinians can be. As an Israeli, everyday is a dangerous day. Palestina is bombing the jewish side with a lot of rockets everyday. So don’t talk about innocent Palestinians generally, please. The party in Palestina is a terroristic one. And yes, there are also a lot of innocent civilians that die on both sides. Even so there must be found a solution for two states. Actual generations just transfer the rage of today to the next generations, so that there won’t be an end.

To the topic:
I’ve also visited a concentration camp some years ago. In my opinion, it really shows the horror of the past. If you stand in front of these ovens, for example, it feels as if It happened right in front of our eyes. Although the evidence is clearer than clear (witnesses who have seen the hills of dead bodys and so on), there are a lot of people who deny the allegation of millions of dead jewish people.

Azar (No 13) states: “This man who suffered so much at the hands of Germans refuses to criticize the Israelis for the unnecessary killings of innocent Palestinians”

I can only describe it as a form of myopia. Perhaps the victims of the murderous Nazis regime and their descendants are, in turn, taking their revenge on another weak and vulnerable group. I can not grasp why this can not be, at least, acknowledged. Why is the murder of a child in the Death Camps of the Third Reich as part of a systematic, industrial scale, ethnic cleansing programme less shocking than the death of a child in the Gaza or West Bank as result of actions taken to ‘protect’ the Jewish state?

The preserved remains of the death camps are reminders of a barely fathomable evil. The survivors of those death camps, of that evil, were determined to create and preserve, at whatever the cost in terms of sacrifice, a homeland for themselves.

Every Palestinian child killed as a result of Israeli policy of containment toward the West Bank and Gaza shares a common right of ancestry with a Jewish, Gypsy or Disabled child murdered by the Nazis in the Death Camps over six decades ago.

Re Steve Bolger’s comments about Jews being sent from USA back to Hitler’s Germany during World War II.

1. For the purpose of this comment of mine I assume Steve’s information is correct, however I do not know this.

2. If such Jews had simply been admitted to the USA, Nazi spies would have disguised themselves as such Jews to sneak in. The following fact substantiates this explanation.

3. A Jewish friend of mine managed to emigrate at age 16 from Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) to England, where his family had some distant relatives. He was later sent to Canada just in case he happened to be a spy. In Canada he was imprisoned in a camp built for such refugees. There was one camp for men and one for women. Yes, they were imprisoned and the sexes were separated, but otherwise life was made as pleasant as possible. My friend said he played bridge and chess day and night and often dreamed of the cards and pieces. After the war he returned to England and later to Germany. His family had been gassed at Ausschwitz.

4. I doubt that more than a few people in the USA were more than dimly aware of what was really happening in Germany to the Jews and other persecuted minorities.

So, editor, now we sit with 2 million forgotten Iraqi external refugees, and maybe as many internal ones, as well as a few score cargo containers packed with remains of Pakistani youths who went off to Afghanistan in the eternal search of youths for manhood only to be suffocated by the mighty military machine of the USA, because we still cannot speak openly about what the sanctified USA really did in WW II.

I commend Mr. Obama’s straightforward declaration that only human choices define the human condition [beyond the laws of nature that comprise its self-enforcing constitutional framework] at today’s commemoration of D-Day. I don’t know why he would muddy the message by concluding with an invocation of blessing from the far side of the sky.

From the imaginary perspective of divine comedy, it was ironic to see the soldiers of D-Day honored with a military medal created by Napoleon, whose near conquest of Europe inspired Hitler.

A) Judging from the responses to the President’s speech from GOP spokesman Karl Rove, Ari Fleisher, and Senator Inhofe, there is clear evidence that the neocons have never had any intention to be a fair and impartial broker of peace in the Mid East. A steady stream of wars, intimidation, and co-option of client states will always be their modus operandi in the region. The President’s opposition will be more from internal forces than external and that includes from his own party. And the beat goes on.

B) I hereby call on Israel to write and ratify an actual Constitution. That way, the second class status of Israeli citizens who aren’t Jewish will be officially codified and US support for theocracy will be clear. I don’t think that’s too much to ask from a semi-democracy and the largest recipient of US foreign aid, now is it? Of course when we dare to ask Israel to stop the illegal settlement, land grab movement, they ignore both US wishes and the popular will of their people. And the beat goes on.

C) Beyond all of the other issues, if the President or anyone else thinks that getting two sets of people to realistically compromise when the opinions within their populations run the gamut from peacenik to religious fundamentalist extremist, and their leadership is in constant flux and/or disarray, and while they’re both still clinging to the past and their history as tribes, they’re basically dreaming. One side holds all the cards in the matter anyway — to some extent, that means that the other side has nothing to lose. There is no reason to reason to negotiate that I can see: powderkeg status will pertain in the region for decades to come. Hatred is one strong poison. And the beat goes on.

Francis Edmonds, I think people were getting the information, but the crime was so monumental, it was not considered possible, so the information was disbelieved.

My wife’s grandfather crossed Germany from Geneva to Krakow on the eve of the German invasion of Poland, when all of Germany was uniformed and mobilized to invade it. He begged his friends and relatives to go to England with him. The many who disbelieved his warning and stayed behind were killed.

I likewise take the view that all too often correct information was disbelieved, because so monumental.

For example, the friend from Königsberg that I mentioned before actually obtained the papers required to emigrate to England not only for himself but also for his parents and brother. These three people refused to believe him, so he went without them. As before, later on they were gassed.

After the war my friend obtained a degree in sociology from a German university (Tübingen) and did research on what happened. This was possible because about 95% of Nazi government files were still available. My friend used the information in these files to find people who had escaped and interview them and ascertain what became of them, to identify which factors contributed to success later on (e.g. education, whether alone or with a family member, etc.).

He found out that many many Jews from Heilbronn escaped because there, when orders came from above to set up separate schools for Jewish children, the town fathers saw to it that the education and conditions at Jewish schools were definitely inferior. This induced many Jews to leave while it was still possible to leave.

In Haigerloch, on the other hand, the town fathers, who will have meant well enough, saw to it that the Jewish schools were every bit as good as the non-Jewish schools. Consequently, the Jews there did not get sufficient warning, so most of them ended up being killed.

My wife’s grandfather was a rich man who did business on behalf of the Polish government, and travelled on a diplomatic passport. The people living the shtetl life in the countryside could not imagine the forces assembled to destroy them.

Steve Bolger — More often than not, we negotiate to postpone unhappiness, which is close to what you suggest but different by important degrees. In the Middle East, the vow to ‘never forget’ clouds the capacity to envision the future. Sad, that.

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